[Bug 31886] Alarms never come up if evolution wasn't running when the alarm was due

[Andrew Slack]

Public bug reported:
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/31886

Affects: evolution (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Normal
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed

Description:
This severely limits usefulness of alarms. On other systems
(Outlook/win32, iCal/OS X and even Groupwise) if the program is not open
or the computer is turned off when an alarm is due, then the next time
you turn the computer on and open the PIM program the alarms come up as
overdue. All it would need to do is ask itself "Are there any alarms
that are in the past but have not been responded to, i.e. snoozed or
cancelled?" and if so, open them. Without this, you're reliant on
leaving your computer on and evolution open all the time if you want
alarms to actually remind you of things, such as birthdays etc (one of
which I recently forgot :( despite having set an alarm). This is not a
workable situation for a desktop or laptop machine and compares poorly
with other platforms. Ideally alarms should work if the computer is on
and logged in, even if evolution is not running (this is the case with
MS Office 9x and later, and with iCal on Macs) and would seem to be
implementable since the gnome panel is already running the clock which
accesses evolution data (a very nice feature) such as your appointments.
Could this functionality be added to that? It's such a basic thing, I
don't know whether this functionality *is* there but isn't working, or
whether it's a missing feature. I'm using Breezy with Evolution 2.4.1.
If there's any more info I can provide to help or anything I can try,
just let me know. I'm not root on this box, so anything requiring root
access may take me a few days to reply as I have to wait for the
administrator to be free. thanks very much